The San Francisco calamity by earthquake and fire eBook

Financially the prospect was encouraging. Not
a bank lost the contents of its fireproof vaults and
remained practically unharmed, so far as credit was
concerned.

For a number of days it was impossible to open any
strong boxes on account of the great heat which the
thick walls retained, and this naturally caused some
embarrassment and lack of ready money. Nearly
all of them, however, had strong connections in Eastern
cities and large balances to their credit in other
banks of America and Europe. They were also favored
by the fact that the United States Mint and the Sub-Treasury
held between them some $245,000,000 in ready money.
The Secretary of the Treasury immediately deposited
$10,000,000 to the credit of the local banks, and
financiers of the great business centres of the country
added to public confidence by prompt statements that
they would facilitate the reconstruction of the city
by a liberal advancement of funds.

One prominent Eastern capitalist expressed the general
conviction in the following words:

“No great city, unless it dried up entirely
from lack of commercial life blood, was ever annihilated
by such a disaster as that of San Francisco.
Pompeii and Herculaneum were not great cities in the
first place, and in the second, they were completely
covered, smothered as it were, with the ashes and
molten lava of the adjoining volcano, and nearly all
of their inhabitants perished. If it be admitted
that three-fourths of the superstructures, so to speak,
of San Francisco, estimated according to valuation,
is destroyed, we have yet the fact remaining that the
lives of only about one four-hundredth of its population
have been lost.

“San Francisco was not merely land and the buildings
erected upon it, but it was people, and one of the
most active, most hopeful, most vivacious human communities
on the face of the earth. You cannot long discourage
such a community, unless you wipe out three-fourths
of its members. Will San Francisco rise again?
Most certainly it will. Galveston and Baltimore,
not to mention Charleston, Boston and Chicago, showed
the spirit of material resurrection in American communities,
sore-smitten by calamity. After Galveston had
been made a desert of sand and debris, there were
predictions that it would never rise again. What
was the outcome? A finer Galveston than before,
and finer than many years of slow improvement in the
natural course would have made it. Baltimore
is busier commercially than it was before the great
fire.

“San Francisco is exceedingly fortunate in the
fact that its moneyed institutions remain strong,
with abundant supplies of funds. It is true that
many of them undoubtedly hold large numbers of real
estate mortgages as securities for loans, and that
much of the property thus represented is now in ashes.
But with care and an accommodating spirit practically
all of those mortgaged can be so nursed that they will
be made absolutely good. The banks will be found